


the image of me in the background

by BlindSwandive



Series: Good Girl [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dissociation, Frustrated!Sam, Gender Dysphoria, Gender or Sex Swap, Hair Brushing, Hair Kink, Masturbation, Object Insertion (implied), Other, Self-Esteem Issues, Sex-swap hex, Showering Sam Winchester, body image issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-10-18 17:26:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17585153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlindSwandive/pseuds/BlindSwandive
Summary: When Sam gets some bad news on lifting a sex-swap hex he's stuck under, he tries to undertake some self-care.  (This is a continuation from "Good Girl" and "Anything to Keep You Happy" but stands alone pretty well.)For SPN Kink Bingo, filling the free square with the kink masturbation.





	the image of me in the background

**Author's Note:**

> So many thanks to [Wings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wings_of_crows/pseuds/wingstocarryon) for an absolutely world-class beta and helpful discussion; this is leaps and bounds better for her help. Any remaining issues are mine. 
> 
> Please be aware that Sam's self-image in this is pretty poor and he's experiencing what look a lot like dissociation and gender dysphoria, so if you're sensitive to those issues please proceed with caution.
> 
> Title from Ani DiFranco's "Overlap."

Rowena came on the seventh day, as promised.

She’d made her examination, she’d consulted her books, and she’d been ready to get to work with startling efficiency. She even had most of the necessaries already: "The only ingredient I still need to reverse the hex is a premenstrual uterus," she'd said pleasantly, like she was asking for a screwdriver or a newt's eye.

Sam stared at her like she’d grown horns. He forgot how… _Rowena_ she could be about things like this, sometimes.

"Excuse me?" he said, to buy some time. Something felt dangerously brittle inside of him.

Dean took the more direct route. "Rowena, what the hell?" he snapped.

"It has to do with essence and nature," she said, waving a delicate hand dismissively, "I don't expect you to understand. Suffice it to say, your witch used prepubescent testicles in her spell; we need a complementary organ."

Dean curled and uncurled his fists by his side. "Right. Okay," he said curtly. "So, can we use one from an animal?"

Rowena shrugged. "If you want Samuel to be male more than you want him to be human, I suppose you might be able to gather one from a calf or a lamb. If you're quite lucky, he might only be stuck with an extra stomach and bovine genitals."

Sam suddenly thought of the wall that they'd put up in his mind, years before, and wasn't sure why. _Don't scratch,_ Death had said, heavy with warning.

"What about--what about getting one from a graveyard?" Dean tried, pressing for alternatives. "Or a morgue?"

Sam took a little comfort in Dean's dog-with-a-bone routine, even as he let his mind's eye rove over the wall, looking for weak spots. He’d been worrying more than a little that Dean wouldn’t mind so much if Sam was stuck this way, but he could tell Dean's anger at being thwarted was real. It was oddly soothing.

"Hm," Rowena said, and her tone had ice crystallizing over the surface. She didn't seem to feel the same way about Dean's frustration as Sam did. "Well, I suppose if Samuel is willing to eat something saturated in embalming fluid, you can get it wherever you like. Of course, it's terribly toxic."

Dean rubbed his hands roughly over his face and took what was probably supposed to be a calming breath before trying again. "Rowena, look--we're not cutting open a live kid to steal her parts. Help me out here." His tone was pleading enough that Rowena looked slightly mollified.

"If you're so concerned about finding an _ethical_ source," she said, plucking a little sulkily at a string of baubles around her wrist, "you can keep an eye on the local hospitals and wait for a young girl to die in a car crash. The uterus can be damaged, so long as it hasn't become fertile yet."

Sam turned his eyes toward Rowena, but he didn't really see her. "There aren't any options that don't involve me eating a kid's organs?" he asked. He tried to sound gentle, but couldn't tell whether it had come off or not. Everything sounded a little flat and echoey to him at the moment.

"There are three," she said, without enthusiasm, but without malice. 

"Then why the hell did you _start_ with the dead kid one?" Dean snapped.

"Because, _Dean,_ " she said sharply, "I happen to be the expert in the room and it is the best option."

"Yeah, well let me judge that," Dean growled back, "what are the other three?"

"Let's see," Rowena said, tone laced with acid. "We can do major surgery on Samuel to remove _his_ uterus. If, that is, you happen to have a reputable surgeon on call whom you can convince to do the surgery. Of course, that will only work if he hasn't already begun producing moon’s blood, which is unlikely, and we wouldn't know for certain until we cut him open. How does that sound, dear?"

Something faltered in Dean's face. Sam thought it might be a flicker of shame or guilt there. Beneath the table, he tipped his knee against Dean's, a private attempt at comfort. 

"What else?" Dean said, diminished but dogged.

"I could lay a new curse that would turn Samuel _into_ a man. Before you interrupt," she said, raising a hand to cut Dean off, "he would become whatever man the hex decided was the male version of this current body."

"That's just Sam," Dean argued.

Rowena pursed her lips. "Do you have a smartphone, dear?"

Eyebrows knit in confusion, Dean pulled his cell out of his back pocket.

"Open up a translation application," she said in a way that pretended at patience Sam doubted was really there.

"Rowena--" Dean argued, but Sam bumped his knee again under the table and nodded. Dean sighed and did what she told him to. "Better be good," he muttered.

"Now," she said, "ask it to translate... Oh, let's see... 'Rowena is a lovely sorceress,'" she said, sweetly. "Into Scottish Gaelic."

After a minute, Dean tried, "'Thuh Rowena nuh see--sear--'" but Rowena waved him down.

"Don't hurt yourself, dear. Just copy it and put it through the other direction, hmm?"

Sam understood immediately where this was going and wound up staring at the surface of the table. He could imagine faint flecks of loose sand between the bricks, now, tiny points of weakness in the wall. 

"And?" Rowena prompted, when Dean finished and didn't say anything. "What does it say now? Am I still a lovely sorceress? A beautiful witch?"

"'Rowena is a great servant,'" Dean reported, flatly.

“The changes _could_ be too small to notice,” Rowena said, not unkindly, but the implication was clear. The changes might not be small at all.

Sam thought privately that that was still preferable to cutting up the fresh corpse of a child, but Dean prompted her for the third option anyway. "What's left?" he asked, and there it was again--that hint of shame or guilt or whatever it was. Dean taking on the weight of the world.

“Wait," Rowena replied simply, and sighed.

Sam nodded slowly, not looking up.

"Hexes like to break down," she explained, "especially when the people who cast them are dead. And especially when the curse runs _counter_ to the nature of the creature it was cast on, rather than in concert with it. If someone had, say, hexed you to be enormous," she said, gesturing to Sam, "or you to be bull-headed," she directed to Dean, "well, those hexes might stick indefinitely. But Samuel’s body and brain still remember being something very different and will be inclined to revert." She lifted one shoulder delicately. "My best guess? The onset of menstruation will probably be enough to shake the hex off and shock Samuel's body back to normal. But that does mean you'll almost certainly be stuck this way for another three weeks, and I can't guarantee it will let go then, either."

Sam could _feel_ Dean’s temper flaring up beside him; he was clearly about to spiral down into thug-mode. Shaking his head slightly, Sam laid a hand on Dean's arm and didn’t look at either of them when he said, “We’ll wait.”

Dean and Rowena argued for a little while longer anyway, and Sam eventually agreed they could leave the police scanner on in case of a "fortuitous accident"--even agreed they could ask Cass and Jack (currently on a series of milk runs for no other reason than to give Sam and Dean some space) to help them monitor reports. But until they’d given the non-violent, non-risky version its best shot, Sam wasn’t willing to do anything more drastic, and neither Dean nor Rowena could change his mind. They would wait, even if it meant lingering in this ill-fitting body for the rest of the month.

 

\- - - - - - -

 

Dean wouldn’t let Sam argue this; if they were in for three weeks more of this, he was going to go out to get Sam some necessaries, and that was that (“You’re gonna need some damn shoes eventually, for chrissakes, what if there’s a fire?”). If Sam didn’t want to come with—and Dean at least seemed to understand why Sam didn’t—he was just going to have to trust Dean to not be an idiot and let him deal with it. He measured Sam’s feet with a measuring tape and his waist with some twine and suggested Sam do something nice to take care of himself while he was gone. 

Sam read that as an almost-subtle instruction to take a shower and comb his hair, since, yeah, he’d maybe been avoiding being alone with himself naked and maybe been avoiding the mirror even more. He wanted to be pissed at the suggestion, but he could smell himself, so he grabbed the caddy of grooming products he still tried to hide from Dean (and still tried to pretend Dean didn’t know about) and Dean’s favorite robe and made for the shower room.

Sam showered efficiently and kept his eyes closed through most of it. But even with all the conditioner he soaked into the knots, he’d been too neglectful of his hair for too many days running, and his eyes were stinging with tears before he gave up on the comb. He’d just have to make do with the brush once his hair was dry.

Once he was toweled off enough to slouch into the robe, Sam figured he felt brave enough to face the mirror. He didn’t spend much time with mirrors on the best of days; whatever Dean might say, Sam had just never felt like he was much worth looking at—brow too heavy, nose too pointy, nostrils too wide and uneven… He hated the mole beside his nose and he hated his long toes; hated the way the veins stuck out on his arms, wished his eyes were blue or green and not the watery nothing-color that couldn’t make up its mind. He always felt too thin or too thick, never that perfect middle-ground, and too tall not to put people ill at ease.

And now even his hair—the one thing about himself he _did_ feel good about most days—was suffering.

Sam sighed and wiped a thin stripe of condensation away from his reflection, just enough to find the ends of his hair where it was hanging a little longer since the hex had taken hold. If he only had to look there, at the narrow strip of neck and shoulders, he was pretty sure he could handle the mirror without his stomach tying itself in knots. It was a soothing ritual, most days, smoothing drops of argan oil over the ends and scritching little circles and long strokes over his scalp. Even today, fingering the oil through the lengths where he could and palming over the knots where he couldn’t, it still felt a little like absolution, a tiny act of contrition for his blasphemy against his mane. Forgive me, Hair, for I have sinned; do two Hail Mary's and a cuticle treatment.

Sam padded back to his room, kit in tow, and burned most of an hour waiting for his hair to dry. He clipped his toenails, and then his fingernails too, as an afterthought. He cleaned up the tornado debris he'd left behind the last three times he'd tried to find clothes that would stay on under their own power, and made the bed. He even tuned into one of his favorite podcasts—or tried, until he realized he hadn’t heard the last five minutes for the second time, too lost in his thoughts, and shut it off. Insult to injury; it was bad enough he was out of place in his body without it dominating his brain and leaving him terminally distracted and brooding. 

When his hair finally seemed dry enough, he fetched his mirror from behind the chair and leaned it against the desk so he could see it from the bed. By then his feet were freezing, so he dug out a roll of socks and sat on the edge of the mattress to pull them on. It was strange seeing slimmer calves (still covered in hair—there was no way in hell he was shaving), but he guessed he didn’t mind his feet so much, this way. They were probably still long for a—for a woman, but small for him. It eased something in his mind, somehow, that one little thing might be better about this body this way. It was a small thing, but he’d take what he could get. He took the time to think gratitude at them before covering them in socks. It seemed right.

To be fair, there were other things about the body that appealed to him. It was just that, unfortunately, they were some of the same things that made him feel wrong and out of place inside of it. His breasts weren’t spectacular or anything, but he was still a red-blooded man at heart, and breasts were always going to be nice to look at; he just didn’t want them to be _his._ And what he’d seen of the whole section from just above the navel to just above the knee was… well, that was really nice, actually, but it made something in his brain squirm and itch if he thought about it or looked at it too long, so he tended to avoid doing that. Nothing like an existential threat to curb your appetite.

Sam fetched his brush (the nice one, with the ergonomic handle and soft, coated bristles that didn’t yank so bad) and sat back down, not really facing the mirror. He needed it close enough that he could check in if he had to, but not so close he'd be forced to confront it the whole time. He took a deep breath and started in, slow.

Sam enjoyed brushing his hair. Always had. If he’d ever in his life been guaranteed the time alone to do it, he could have seen himself falling into the Marcia Brady habit of one hundred strokes before bed without batting an eye. It had just always felt good to him, part scalp massage, part hair-pulling, part long-stroke petting. Nothing could put him to sleep like having his head pet; nothing could turn him on like fingernails scratching lightly over his scalp; nothing could pull embarrassing sounds out of him like having it pulled mid-coitus. He was a hair slut; that was all there was to it.

Habit more than anything had made him try to keep that from Dean. His hair was too prized a target for Dean’s razzing as it was, without Sam sinking so low as to admitting that part of why he liked it that long was that it made it a magnet for other people’s fingers. But since they’d agreed to fuck only one another, it meant his only partner was also someone he couldn’t seem to admit the whole hair slut thing to.

He’d managed to key Dean into the pulling, at least, if by accident; he’d lazily dropped a line he’d picked up from a bumper sticker into an argument once, something about how if Dean was going to keep riding his ass he should at least pull Sam’s hair, but it had gone sideways, not coming off with the sarcasm Sam had been aiming for. (Always a danger when you were kidding on the square, that someone would realize you meant it, too.) At least it had ended the argument. The nervous tension that had been fueling the fight in the first place was better used in a brutal rut, anyway, and they’d both been a lot happier—and calmer—afterwards.

It was never as fun pulling your own, though. And trying to brush through these tangles was mostly an agonizingly slow exercise in pulling his own hair, over and over. He was having to resort to war tactics, starting closer and closer to the ends, subdividing into smaller and smaller sections (and he thanked God for the stupid beauty rags in hospital waiting rooms that had taught him those tricks), and even so it seemed to be taking forever.

When he finally ran out of tangles, he was almost surprised, and had to run the brush through the entirety again just to be sure. 

He groaned with relief when it came up smooth.

Sam risked a look at the mirror to see how it was sitting, and apart from fluffing a little from static, it looked… nice. The extra length made it cross whatever invisible line he’d drawn for himself between masculine enough and not, which was a little disconcerting, but he found himself brushing through it again, still looking at the mirror, watching the way the extra length fanned and fell around his reflection.

His chest felt a little tight, but he couldn’t seem to look away.

He tried not to notice anything but his hair, but it didn’t really work, and piece by piece he saw, _really saw_ himself as he slowly circled his crown with the brush. And he found that it was undeniably still him—he still looked exactly like himself and no one else, enough like himself that anyone who knew him would never buy that it _wasn’t_ him—just softer, slenderer, more delicate. His nose and mouth were more or less the same, but his brow was lighter, the line of his jaw and chin narrower, his neck slim. 

With his hair catching the light from the lamp behind him, there was something hypnotic about brushing, drawing the hair out away from his scalp just to watch it slip from the bristles. And when it cascaded down against his cheek, his throat, it… Well, if it weren’t his own face he was seeing there, haloed in gold, he might… might even have thought it was kind of pretty.

He didn’t know what to do with that.

 _I looked like this in high school,_ he thought, and it was something like true. He felt a vague pang of unease and loss. 

He’d been absolutely convinced he was an ogre, in high school, awkward and ugly. He’d avoided cameras like they would steal his soul (had even tried convincing a shutterbug from one of the many yearbooks that he believed they would, and that they would be disrespecting his religion if they kept trying). Hell, he’d only ever spent time with the mirror to pick at zits and scabs and confirm how much he hated some feature or another, or the way his hair started insisting on flipping up at the ends once he hit puberty and before he’d figured out how to tame it into submission. But now here he was, with the same lighter bones he’d had when he was young, and he was almost—almost nice to look at. 

The thought that he might have been a little bit pretty all that time, and been too wrapped up in hating himself and everyone else too much to notice, hurt something deep down, left him sore in a soft place inside.

Not for the first time, he was gripped by the wild and irresponsible wish that he could hop through time to hug his kid self, promise him that it would be okay someday, that he’d have a home and a place in the world and love and friends and Dean, always and forever Dean. But maybe now he’d have to add something like, like… “You’re not as ugly as you think you are.” Maybe if he really worked himself up to it, he could even manage something that sounded less like a brutal backhanded compliment. Maybe.

Sam sighed and closed his eyes, just letting himself feel the soothing path of the brush through his hair, waiting for the brittle ache of that train of thought to fade. He brushed it all back from his forehead a couple of times to get the good-sore of pulling against the natural lay before letting it fall back out along the usual part. When he opened his eyes, he even wound up smiling at his reflection and the way all of that hair was lying full and fluffed and tousled around his face and shoulders.

He supposed if he tried, he could _kind_ of see why Dean was looking at him “like that” all the time, these days.

Something in his posture had changed subtly while he wasn’t paying attention—subconsciously reading cues in the mirror and adjusting to them, if he had to guess, something about social mirroring or biofeedback. Instead of his feet being planted evenly on the floor, knees spread comfortably, his knees and toes had tipped together in some show of demureness, pressing his thighs lightly together. The hand not holding the brush was no longer braced on one knee, but had slipped down to rest in the valley where his legs met, fingers curled in a gentle arch. Even his expression had softened, his brow unknotting into smoothness.

Sam set the brush aside and folded his hands together close to his knees and watched how it changed his reflection, a nervous experiment. Maybe… maybe if he tried to see what Dean saw, he could survive a few more weeks of this with a little less existential anxiety. 

Feeling strangely like a voyeur, Sam hazarded a glance down at the V where the lapels of the robe overlapped over his breasts, and at the tops of his still slightly knobby knees where they disappeared under the heavy material. When his cheeks got hot and he’d turned his eyes politely away, he scolded himself for being an idiot—it was _his_ body, and he wasn’t disrespecting anyone by looking at it. Hell, if the performance of “Vagina Monologues” he’d dutifully attended in college was telling the truth, time alone with yourself and a mirror could even be an empowering and life-changing experience, right? 

He’d settle for feeling a little less alienated.

Flushed and rattled, Sam drew a deep breath for courage and tried abortively to open the robe, but wound up with his fingers knotted around the lapels and unwilling to budge. He scolded himself again, and tried standing, thinking maybe he could parlay the motion into a single, robe-discarding motion, but it didn’t get him any farther.

“This is really stupid,” he said out loud, thinking maybe the aural reinforcement would make the point, but in the end he had to turn away from the mirror— _and_ close his eyes—before he could convince his fingers to do his bidding.

Swallowing against the thick discomfort in his throat, he managed to force his feet to shuffle around until he was facing the mirror again, though he had to ball his fists at his sides to keep from crossing his arms protectively over his stomach. His eyes kept sliding off of his reflection, looking near the mirror rather than at it, until they accidentally caught sight of one perfect little mole low on his hip, dangerously close to the brown curls, and he latched on, fixing his gaze on the safe-but-not-safe spot until he could get his head together.

Hips. He had hips. Well—he’d always had hips, but now he had _hips._ They weren’t world-shattering, neither boy-slim nor Earth goddess-wide, but over the solid muscle, there was a pleasing, low curve, smooth and graceful. 

_Iliac crest,_ he remembered from an anatomy course he’d taken more or less for fun in college. The wide arc of the hipbone. And he could just barely see it pressing forward along the lean plane where his hips met his belly, though it was subtler now than when he’d glimpsed it while lying on his back under Dean. He’d gotten strange butterflies every time he’d seen it this week, filled with fleeting visions of kisses laid along it, and teeth.

Without consciously deciding to do it, Sam let a few shaking fingertips brush over the curve, his eyes darting between his hip and the image of it in the mirror. His hand looked strong, if smaller than usual, long and androgynous with the quick-short nails, but there was nothing androgynous about the territory it was mapping now.

In the mirror, he let his eyes shift up and over to his naval. The little curve of tummy was something he’d have scowled at on his own—his normal—his _usual_ body, and had whenever it snuck up on him in lulls when he didn’t run or hunt enough, but he couldn’t manage now, with this body. He wouldn’t have judged it on any woman he’d seen naked, and that reflex seemed to be a little stronger than the one for self-judgment, right now.

Sam swallowed and let his fingers drift up toward his belly, but the path cut too low, brushing over the very edge of the curls between his legs, and everything for about five inches in every direction jolted. It was as though he’d brushed his skin with ice or been poked in that spot over his ribs that sent him leaping every time, like he’d touched a live wire. He was miles from the various erogenous points, but his body didn’t seem to realize that.

His fingers were shaking a little when he tried it again. (For science, of course. Just to see if he could replicate the effect.) It felt like a reflex, not quite as strong the second time but still there, a pulse. A breathless laugh caught him by surprise.

When Sam focused and felt, he more or less tended to picture whatever he was experiencing happening to his _usual_ body. And when he looked at this body in the mirror, disconnected, it was more like seeing what he was doing to someone else. Taken together, it was like looking out through two different lenses at once, seeing two worlds awkwardly superimposed—he was touching a girl, and she was reacting, but he was being touched in the same way, and the two bodies were the same, even if they didn’t fit together. He was his own mirror, doubled and divided.

It made him a little dizzy.

It made him a little hungry.

Sam’s fingers drifted—of their own accord, if you’d asked him—into the downy fur, and he couldn’t decide whether or not to close his eyes, the ‘touched’ part of him trying to flutter them shut while the ‘touching’ needed to see the path his fingers were cutting.

There wasn’t much Sam regretted about monogamy, but not getting to watch a girl come apart under his fingers (his tongue, his teeth) was one of them.

He supposed… He supposed, just maybe—just this once…

Sam let himself sink down onto the edge of the bed, his knees feeling entirely too watery to manage it standing. They still locked shut instinctively when he landed, so he took a deep breath and tried to shift his brain further over to the ‘touching’ side, the ‘him,’ willing his hands not to shake while he soothed them both over his thighs, softly coaxing.

“Come on,” he murmured to his reflection, and tried to keep it low enough in his throat that the higher pitch wouldn’t break the spell. “Open up…”

When his thighs didn’t obey, there was a sliver of inspiration, like an itch at the back of his brain, and he swallowed. Feeling half in a fugue, Sam whispered, “Be a good girl.”

One knee rocked uneasily side to side, opening up a wavering gap to his palms, and Sam hitched a sharp breath, a little surprised that had worked. He slipped one hand quickly into the space before it could close on him, sliding it up until his calloused palm was flush against his mound, the tip of his middle finger dipping between the lips there like it belonged, pressing aimlessly until it found _hot_ and _wet_ and _in._

The noise that came out of Sam was mostly air, but through his tight throat it sounded rough and ragged. His fingertip felt foreign and invasive between his legs, but that slick and swollen heat felt like heaven to his hand, enticing and full of promise. There was a bizarre flash of nostalgia for it, for the sweet and half-remembered bodies of lovers past, and he traced the pad of his finger tenderly from end to end, mapping the terrain and spreading the wetness carefully into the folds until every bit of him was slippery. The longer he worked, the fuller the lips became, flushed with blood and warmth even as the rest of his skin pebbled with goosebumps in the chilly air, and he could imagine the way it would have encased his cock, plump and grasping to draw him inside.

He let his finger slip into that welcoming space, dazed with wonder and a vague, free-floating lust. It felt strangely disconnected from the other side, but he gamely tried brushing the pad of his thumb over his clit, and that was something else entirely, sharp and startling. And when that made his muscles clench, fluttering undirected against the invading finger, he didn’t feel disconnected anymore. He felt an unfocused kind of need, instead, leaving him hot and just a little queasy.

Heart in his throat, Sam rubbed across the naked nerves again, and almost jerked his hand away. He could have sworn he felt every groove in his thumbprint brushing rough over his clit, and it was too much, too raw and direct. It almost hurt, like scratching an itch too hard.

Panting, more from the shock than anything, Sam cautiously shifted his hand until he could reach the hood, instead, touching it tentatively. When there wasn’t a zing of pain, or whatever that grating, oversensitive feeling was, his shoulders sank, releasing the tension that had crept in unnoticed. He held still for a long moment, catching his breath and waiting to make sure this body wouldn’t betray him with another stab when he let his guard down. But even a gentle press down against the hood didn’t hurt.

Sam experimented cautiously, now rubbing a vague circle, now sliding side to side. It turned out he could even press pretty hard, even rock over it firm and careless, from there, and he groaned some mix of relief and anticipation when he got the first inkling of that feeling that Dean always managed to build there with his tongue.

It was fumbling and awkward, but moment by moment, a hum began to build under his thumb, somehow simultaneously pinpoint focused inside his clit and pulsing nebulously further inside of him, a ball of sensation buzzing in the space between his thumb and his finger. He couldn’t work out doing much with the finger and still have any grace in his thumb (maybe with enough practice?) but the fact of it being there seemed to work, startling him when he clenched aimlessly but rewarding him with a feeling of fullness, of being pinned between the two points, of being just a little trapped.

He hovered midway, hot and wanting but his orgasm hung just outside of his reach. Sam battled down disgust at the irony; books on the highest shelves in the storage rooms were now just a hair too far away for him to grasp without a boost, and if the same were somehow true masturbating, he would have to pull a Dean and go down to the armory to shoot something. And maybe rethink his unwillingness to eat part of a cadaver.

Sam shoved that thought quickly out of mind and forced his eyes—open but unseeing—to focus on his reflection, hoping the free pornography of a girl fingering herself would be enough to tip him over the edge. He looked desperately at his warm brown nipples, taut and hard, at the curve of his breasts, at the obscene rocking of his hand between his legs, and there was a pulse inside, an encouraging ache. He took in the goosebumps on his strong arms and the sheen of sweat on his sides, and the image of running his tongue up over those ribs rose unbidden, bizarre but thrilling. 

Goaded by the tantalizing closeness of climax, Sam imagined himself—his usual self—pushing this girl, _this_ version of him back onto the bed, forcing his way up inside of the space that would be too small for him, too tight and too new, while he ached and made way just the same. He groped with his free hand over one breast, squeezing just a little too hard, pinching the nipple and pretending he was nipping it with his own teeth, and his back arched. He could almost feel his own weight on top of himself, pressing his own breath out of his chest while he pistoned hard inside, too big and too much and too—

Sam creaked out a moan when he came, biting it back out of a lifetime of habit even though there was no one near to hear him. He kept rocking his hand clumsily through the fog of endorphins, dragging out the climax as long as he could manage while his muscles spasmed unevenly around his finger, greedily digging for just a little more and just a little more. He only let up when it started to hurt, sweating and breathless and honest-to-God high.

He collapsed unceremoniously onto his back on the mattress, feeling the sweat trickle down from behind his knees and under his arms into the comforter. With a caution usually reserved for explosives, he slowly withdrew his fingers, reveling in the thick fluid coating them, slick and silky. He could smell it, even without raising his hand—there weren’t a lot of smells he liked more, if he was totally honest with himself—and before he was quite aware he was doing it, he had brought his fingers up close to his face to breathe in that scent. A little guiltily, but full of illicit thrill, he dipped his fingers into his mouth to suck them clean of that lush taste, tart and bright and distilled sex, groaning quietly into the chill air.

The shivering came on fast and unexpected, and Sam grabbed blindly for the discarded robe, pulling it up over his damp-again body to keep warm and huddling his knees underneath. He deliberated briefly on whether or not he should just go take another shower to wash the sweat and wet off of him, but while Dean had never quite said it out loud, Sam had gotten the distinct impression that Dean liked the smell of him best when it was tinged with sex and exertion. And since Dean was out being bullheadedly sweet on his behalf, Sam supposed the least he could do in return was smell like girl, clean enough but not _too_ clean.

In the hazy glow of it, Sam considered for all of two or three seconds feeling guilty for jerking off in bed while Dean was out, instead of waiting for him, but it wasn’t like he wouldn’t be able to go again (there were perks to this body, after all). And, anyway, Dean _had_ told him to take care of himself.

Sam realized he was grinning like an idiot at that, and some of the ever-present weight in his chest lightened. It even felt easier to breathe, and he let out a long, satisfied sigh. So long as he didn’t think too much about the bizarre splitting or doubling in his little fantasy, well, he might just be okay with the way he’d spent his afternoon. He rearranged to get more comfortable under his improvised blanket, but winced when one knee landed on something hard and a little pokey.

Frowning, Sam dug until he found the offending object—his discarded hairbrush. He looked at it for a long time, at the smooth, rubbery coating and the light curve of the handle, how it fit inside his hand, and thought maybe he was seeing it in a new light.

Sam set the brush down and reached for his phone off the nightstand; the only message from Dean was an exceedingly vague ‘struck out here tryin somewhere else’ text from about a half hour earlier. For all Sam knew, he might still have another hour to fill before Dean got back home.

Feeling lighter than he had in a week—maybe a month—Sam found himself tapping out a spur-of-the-moment text:

_So what did you mean by take care of myself?_

And left it at that. He was pretty sure Dean would get the innuendo. 

Leaving his phone within easy reach, Sam snuggled down into the robe again, closing his eyes and breathing in the collar where the smell of Dean was heaviest. But it wasn’t long before he was opening one eye, again, eyeing the handle of his brush.

 

\- - - - - -

 

When Dean got inside, he called out, “Sammy?” and sounded breathless, like he’d taken the stairs at a run. Sam barely bothered to look inside the plastic bags from what he was pretty sure were secondhand shops and a big box store before giving him a hero’s welcome. Right there on the floor, by the stairs.


End file.
